Goodeye8

Valve corporation is an American company. America has used visa and mastercard to target ICC judges who also live outside the US. If the government wants they can try and strongarm Valve to do their bidding

You don’t need a lot of people. I don’t remember the exact percentage but it’s something like if 10% of the population is willing to show support your cause it’s enough to get a law passed. Just look at SKG initiative. It took a million Europeans to get the political ball rolling not just in the EU but also in California. What we need is a continuation of SKG where digital purchases of products actually gives us ownership over said product and not just a use license where companies like Sony can do whatever they want with your purchase.

And? Just because it’s a good practice doesn’t mean it’s okay for Windows to go and fuck up every other OS on the drive. There shouldn’t be any technical issues with having two OS on the same drive. What if you just want to test two different OS so you could decide which one to keep? Are you supposed to buy a new drive just because you’ll need it for a month?

What you’ve said is not an argument why Windows gets to fuck up every other OS that’s on the same drive.

They shouldn’t. There are a lot of arguments why they shouldn’t. But there’s only one argument why they might, it’s the most corrupt government in the entire US history and they’re very gung ho about siphoning wealth upwards. No amount of logic or reasoning will work against corruption. If the government wants to bail them out they will find a way to bail them out.

Of course but the cost can be mitigated. I’ve seen an AI built project and the outcome is that you pretty much have to continue using AI to continue development because it’s borderline incomprehensible for humans. When AI fails to continue development you scrap the entire project and start from scratch.

I imagine all companies that allowed AI to go wild in their codebase have a lot of components that need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

How do you feel when men or women glance at your moobies?

So I did some quick digging and it does seem that there overall work week in Netherlands is rather flexible. That said I did find this from Arbeidstijdenwet:

2 The employer organizes the work in such a way that the employee aged 18 years or older at most work performed during:

a. 12 hours per shift;

b. 60 hours a week, and

c. average 48 hours per week in each period of 16 consecutive weeks.

Legally the upper limit you can work in a week is 48 hours. But that’s the upper limit and not what is happening in practice. So I looked that up as well. For full-time employees I found that men average 38.4 hours and women average 35.0 hours. The average work week of 31.9 hours doesn’t mean Netherlands has 32 hour work weeks, it’s just skewed lower primarily by part time workers.

Well yeah, but the price is so high because the big 3 refuse to meet the demand so CXMT selling ram is also going to force the hand of the big 3 unless they’re okay with CXMT just gobbling up the market. It won’t happen overnight but if the AI deals are to be believed CXMT has years to scale up production because the big 3 will have their docks stuck in the AI pot.

But what’s the legally defined full work week? If legally the full work week is 5 days you don’t have a 4 day work week, you just have enough privileged people and part time workers to bring the average down to 30.

You don’t have to like Gaben to see that Tim is much worse. Tim only cares about business. That’s why Epic store is great for publishers and developers and dogshit for customers, because Tim doesn’t see you as nothing more than cattle. Your interests don’t matter, you’re just a vessel to extract money from. You can dislike Gaben all you want but Valve at least treats you like a customer.

Part of the reason Valve gets away with it is that PC is an open platform. If you don’t want to buy from Valve you don’t have to buy directly from Valve. If you find a better deal elsewhere you can buy the game elsewhere. That’s not true for consoles. When it comes to digital only on Playstation you pay the price Sony tells you to pay because nobody except Sony is allowed to sell on Playstation. If Sony decides to jack up the price you just have to deal with it. If Sony refuses to put their games on sale you just have to deal with it.

The argument about removing your library is true for Valve (less so for GOG because you can just download all your installers and store them locally) but I think that’s a problem of the law. I think the law should catch up to digital media and give it the same rights as physical media. I hope SKG movements makes enough headway to lay the groundwork for someone else to come along and establish actual ownership of digital media.

While there are a lot of reasons why getting rid of physical media is bad (such as physical media getting certain consumer protections that digital currently doesn’t) I’m going to try to make an argument I think you’d understand. From the image in the post Dead space digital version costs 69.99 but Dead Space physical version costs 18. Why does it cost 69.99 digitally and 18 physically? Because corporations like money. A physical disk cuts into their profit margin. They could’ve made 139.98 by selling the game to two people but instead they only made 69.99 (I know the numbers aren’t accurate and from physical sales corporations make even less but for the sake of the argument I’ll stick to those numbers) because only the first person paid the corporations and when that person was done they sold it to the second person who didn’t pay the corporations anything. In a sense physical media cost corporations a sale. But that’s one of the benefits of consoles for consumers. You can actually get old physical disks relatively cheap on the second hand market. Now you could argue that physical disk users are a minority and you’re probably right, but the fact that a physical market exists keeps corporations in check. If a game is priced too high you can always see if you can find a physical version for cheaper. But if there’s no physical version available you pay what they tell you to pay. Digital only on a closed platform is just giving corporations more control over the pricing of games and we know they want to jack up the price.

I’m with you, I prefer digital media over physical. But my digital media is also bought on an open platform so I can choose where I get the best deal when buying digital media. I don’t have to pay the price Steam gives me, I can buy the game on GOG or Itch or a plethora of third party sellers. Despite the media being digital I retain (some) control over the pricing. That’s not true for consoles so on consoles digital only is a horrible idea.

Nah. Sony will stick around, Playstation will die, Microsoft kills Xbox and everyone will complain about Steam being a monopoly despite their competition choosing to shoot themselves in the foot and dying all on their own.

And the reason we knew in advance that this was the expected outcome is because this was the original plan. The DFA is the pivot from the original plan because of the concerns of the gaming industry lobbying against the citizens initiative.

No it wasn’t. The original plan was to get the citizens initiative to a point where the EU commission has to do something. DFA was more of a backup plan in case the initiative itself fails. Had the commission done its job the initiative probably wouldn’t have shifted its focus to the DFA. And it’s very much a series of lucky coincidences that the initiative could continue with DFA.

In the last 22 years the per game production cost has gone down. Back then games were largely physical and had a huge distribution network. You had the cost of putting the game on a disk or a cartridge or whatever physical medium, then you had the logistics cost to distribute it and finally the store selling you the game put their own marginal to justify keeping it on shelf. That was also what kept the indie scene from springing into existence because getting your game released was a massive undertaking. And you had to test test test because patching games post-launch was a pain in the ass. Now physical media is largely streamlined and the focus is shifting more on digital (because it gives better margins). Development tools have also improved and day 1 patches are the norm, all of which bring down development costs. So you can’t really compare the cost of a game from 20-25 years ago to the cost of a game from today because the industry has matured massively in that period.

And the industry has been complaining about game development being on the verge of collapse for around 15 years. I made the argument back then and that argument has largely stayed true for most of that period. The argument is that if making games is so unsustainable we should see a reduction of scope. Instead of throwing every bog-standard AAA feature into a bloated AAA game we should see games with a more focused vision and minimal bloat. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen studios try to cut the bloat. So I believe gaming right now has reached a point where it’s unsustainable for AAA but in previous years I’d argue it was just fearmongering to justify squeezing out more money. But it doesn’t mean the price increase is justified. Indie games and games made by private companies prove that the price increase isn’t necessary. The best game of 2025, Clair Obscur, was $50. One of the best games of 2024, Balatro, was $15. The best game of 2023, Baldurs Gate 3, was $60. None of those games were made by a publicly traded company. It’s the publicly traded company mindset that necessitates the price increase because you need to spend every penny you get and your returns need to grow with every release so you could get more money to spend which then means you need to make even more profits.

I’m not saying the price should stay at $60 for forever, but so far I haven’t seen a good reason why it should increase when we can get quality games at that price point or even at a lower price point.

You know, you could take 5 minutes to verify hearsay. From the official source

Launching November 19, 2026, for the PlayStation® 5 computer entertainment systems and Xbox Series X|S games and entertainment systems for $79.99, Grand Theft Auto VI features a single-player experience set in the biggest, most immersive evolution of the series yet.

The Grand Theft Auto VI: Ultimate Edition amplifies this experience with an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel, and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story, and will be available for $99.99.

It took me longer to put this comment together than it took me to find that information.

If you’re planning on upgrading why not just build a brand new PC? Since gaming is generally more hardware demanding leave your current PC for work and build a gaming PC. Putting the two together (especially with how you’re using it) you’re not only increasing the overall hardware demands but you’re also increasing the damage of a potential infection. I’m also pretty sure 2080ti isn’t going to last you another 10 years. The problem with the 20 series is that it hasn’t aged well. If you get everything else top of the line your system will be bottlenecked by the 2080ti. I would build a separate gaming PC and cut the memory demands to buy a beefier GPU. The current PC I’d continue using as a work station.

Buying DDR4 at the current price is a waste of money so if a new PC isn’t an option I wouldn’t do anything. 32GB should be enough for what you’re doing if you weren’t trying to run everything at once.

I’m more amazed he hasn’t thrown Isreal under the bus already. He hasn’t had an issue with throwing people under the bus before, and yet somehow Israel perseveres despite Iran publicly humiliating him for months.

Makes you wonder what kind of dirt Isreal has on him.

Nah, fuck the DNC. The current failures of the democratic party are specifically because of the DNC. They’re more interested in serving corporations than the people who vote for them.